Vantage Point Park

This tiny park is at East 12th Street and 13th Avenue, on a low rise next to a lot of activity. Between here and the water—Brooklyn Basin, the innermost part of Oakland Inner Harbor—run East 8th Street, I-880, Embarcadero Street, BART and the Southern Pacific rail line, plus I’m sure a number of underground power and water lines and what not. It’s a highly concentrated lifeline corridor. Across the way is the Coast Guard base on Government Island. In the distant left corner in the 800×600 version (click the image) you can just see Alameda Island. Except for the hummock in the foreground, everything visible is made land, artificial fill, with a high water table. It was created more or less haphazardly starting a century ago, and under strong shaking a lot of old fill of this type is prone to liquefaction.

Past the left edge of this photo, a little buried creek valley running down 14th Avenue reaches the bay. It’s all filled in, too. All the crowded life lines I mentioned cross that creek bed. In the next big Hayward fault earthquake, this is a highly vulnerable spot.

I took this shot on 19 November 2008 during a walk I took the length of Oakland, from the San Leandro to the Ashby BART stations. Lots more photos from that day on my Fotothing site.